The President has not
specified what form his intervention would take.At some times he has suggested that it would
take the form of a brief bombing campaign.At others, he has suggested that regime change is on the table.Both Feinstein and Boxer premise their
support on the assumption that “Obama is requesting a limited engagement, with
no troops”.

Such an engagement
would be the worst of all worlds.It
would spawn a predictable backlash against the United States, would risk
solidifying Assad’s public support against an external threat, and would be
unable to destroy Assad’s chemical capabilities.On top of all of this, it would manifestly
fail to protect Syrian civilians, who are as vulnerable to conventional as
chemical weapons (over 100,000 people have been killed in the course of the
civil war).Such an intervention is not
humanitarian in nature, but merely punitive.

The Chronicle described
how “both premise their support for a strike on Syria on a need to prevent the
United States from being seen as a ‘paper tiger’”.In other words, this is about an ugly
nationalistic ego and the need to do something, anything, even if it is a
spectacular failure when it comes to helping Syrians who will be the ones to
pay the price for the ill-judged U.S. attack.

Feinstein—a committed
neoconservative who supported the Iraq war, defended illegal NSA spying after
failing in her oversight duties regarding the same, argued for escalation in
Afghanistan, and is the Senate’s most influential proponent of state secrecy—is
circulating a DVD showing the horrific results of the chemical attack in Syria
(widely assumed to have been mounted by President Assad, although the U.S. has
failed to declassify the intelligence which they say proves as much) as a way
of pressuring her colleagues in Congress to act.This is a good example of Feinstein missing
the point which her characteristic aplomb.No one needs convincing that the chemical attacks were a bad thing.No one thinks that Assad is a good guy.

But wallowing in what
scholars of human rights refer to as a “pornography of suffering” is no
substitute for planning and policymaking.We can’t allow our emotions to drive bad policy which will compound the
plight of Syrian citizens.We recently had
a eight-year experiment of “government by gut”, of watching a President conduct
his foreign policy based on the movements of his alimentary canal.In case anyone’s forgotten, it didn’t
work.

In a very real way, Feinstein’s
own chickens are coming home to roost.The war of aggression in Iraq, the many vetoes at the UN to support
human rights violations by U.S. allies, and the refusal of the U.S. to sign up
to international treaties are precisely the things which have weakened and
undermined international laws and norms.U.S. hypocrisy does not provide an excuse for the behaviour of other
states’ terrorism.But it does explain
why the U.S. finds itself in such a weak position, and why the sociopathic
regimes in Russia and China are easily able to block U.S. efforts to censure
Syria’s government or protect its citizens.

Feinstein’s
rationalisation of her decision to back military intervention also demonstrates
her well-documented contempt for her constituents and the public interest.Writing of those constituents, she remarked
that they “have not seen what I have seen, or heard what I have heard”.And the good Senator is doing her best to
keep it that way.If she knows of some
concrete objective for U.S. intervention, or is aware of some secret plan for a
successful humanitarian intervention, she would do well to share it with the
public.But the Senator has never been
able to contain her impatience with those of us in the public who think that we
deserve to understand the basis for her decision-making, or our view that
because when government acts it acts in our names, we need to exercise a little
oversight of our own when it is so clear that she and her colleagues aren’t up
to the job.

The longer we keep
people like Feinstein in powerful positions in the Senate, the weaker the U.S.
will grow, both in terms of its moral legitimacy and in terms of its capacity
to influence global developments.

If her Iraq vote—where she
was clearly in the right—was a comfort to Senator Boxer, her Syria vote might very
well haunt her.The President’s argument
that it is necessary to break international law in order to defend it might
find more sympathetic ears if he was willing to leverage U.S. intelligence
findings about the chemical attack to persuade other state actors at the United
Nations, or if he was willing to explain to the public what he would actually
like to achieve in Syria, and how he thinks a limited unilateral intervention can
achieve that goal.

Boxer reiterated a
demonstrably false opposition, suggesting that the only alternative to military
action is “walk[ing] away”.She is wrong
and she should know it.There are many
alternatives to military action which have yet to be exhausted.Most of these alternatives stand a much
greater chance of bringing some peace to Syrians, and to actually helping the
country and its citizens than an ill-defined military intervention.

Instead, Senators are
preparing to write the President a blank check as he fumbles to make up a
policy for intervention on the fly.Everything he and his cabinet have said about the proposed U.S. military
intervention in Syria suggests that should Congress endorse the President’s
request for authorisation, the U.S. will be acting in a careless way which is
likely to do more harm than good in Syria.

A successful
humanitarian intervention should be concerned with the welfare of the people it
is seeking to protect rather than the nationalistic ego of the country staging
the intervention.Feinstein and Boxer
should reject the President’s rush to a military solution and ask the
administration to prioritise humanitarian relief, a diplomatic offense, and
efforts to isolate the Syrian government and bring a halt to, rather than
escalate, the violence in that country.

1 comment:

Feinstein and Boxer are nothing but lying Zionist shills doing the bidding of Israel. Feinstein has stated that she knows things that we don't, just like she lied about seeing the children at Sandy Hook. She is doing the bidding of her overlords and will do anything and everything against the American People. She was more than willing to try to disarm the American People while helping terrorists!!!

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I work as an assistant professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research. This blog also appears on the website of the Redding Record Searchlight.